Hyper-V Advice Needed

PiKe

PiKe

PiKe

Caporegime
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Hoping someone can help me with this one, currently I look after a fairly large site, split over 3 locations, each location is networked via leased line to the central location.

Two of them have onsite servers running SBS 2011, support will be ending for this soon, so I'm looking into options, I would like to have a single server solution at the main site, but split AD/Fileserver and the Exchange server over 2 VMs, I would also like some resilience in the event of hardware failure, I understand this is possible with clustering, but I guess you really need a SAN for this to work effectively (if at all).

Without a SAN, the AD Replication and Fileserver could be easily mirrored using DFSR, I'm not sure on the exchange side of things, would MRS work or would I need to use DAG?
 
You wouldn't necessarily need a DAG, but it'd be handy. In the event of a disaster if you have two Exchange Servers you could always migrate the DBs/Mailboxes, but a DAG would be better.

You don't necessarily need a SAN, you could have a mirror of all of your servers in one location on one HV Host and another on another HV Host in a different location and just allow replication to happen, obviously it's not as HA/Redundant as a multi-host environment with a SAN, but if you're not a big enough use-case for a SAN then that's fair enough. I would however suggest unless there's a reason you're unable to go Cloud, get away from on-prem Exchange, 365 will take that issue away from you.
 
Does a Hyper-V replica require manual intervention if the host server goes down?
 
Look into Veeam, it'll do replication to off/on-site targets so you can have a VM you can fire up if the worst was to happen. It's relatively cheap now that they've offered a subscription licence option.

Definitely look into DAGs for your Exchange platform, should one of them fail the other DAG will pick up the work with zero interruptions to end users.
 
DAG licensing is included with Exchange - usually you would have two Exchange Servers or two Exchange Databases to create a DAG for HA/Resilience.
 
Do I need a witness server for a DAG to work? There are only going to be 2 hyper-v machines, no instances will be on bare metal so if the machine with the witness dies, what would happen?
 
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